AMD PowerNow! wins EPA gong

Twinkle, twinkle, Energy Star

AMD has been patted on the back by the US Environmental Protection Agency for its efforts to promote energy-saving technologies.

In particular, the EPA likes AMD's PowerNow! power-preservation system, due to debut real soon now in Chimpzilla's Palomino-based Mobile Athlon, and its AMD-760 chipset, which hooks the CPU into the rest of the system.

"These and other leading edge technologies are helping the environment by reducing the electricity needed to power the end product, thereby reducing power plant emissions and air pollution-securing a place for AMD as a frontrunner in designing energy efficient enabling technology," says the EPA's Craig Hershberg.

AMD's reward for all this eco-friendliness is an Energy Star Certificate of Recognition for Technical Innovation.

The reason the 760 was given the EPA thumbs-up was its support for DDR SDRAM. According to the EPA pronouncement: "Manufacturers of DDR memory have reported reduced power consumption of nearly 50 per cent compared to Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory (SDRAM) technology."

So presumably every other vendor who offers a DDR-supporting chipset will win an Energy Star gong in due course.

Now we've no doubt that AMD's PowerNow!, Flash and other technologies help cut power consumption and thus do their little bit to solve California's power problems... sorry, reduce electricity demand, cut emissions, etc. but it's a tad rich given how power-hogging Athlon implementations have been and how un-green the production of chips is.

It's also ironic that Chimpzilla wins an award for its eco-friendly chip technologies when the real motivation was to compete with Intel, which in turn is trying to compete with Transmeta. ®